Getting into Koblenz station Google maps showed me I was with in walking distance of my lodgings,it’s not a hotel but a room in a house( sort of,not quite Airbnb either) I took a wrong turn of course and walked for a fair while but found the place eventually and there’s nothing here apart from other houses! No shops immediately close or bars or even bus stops.Whereas everything in Wuppertal was close at hand here I am in a virtual desert.I had this last year in Freiburg and found I was closer to things than I thought so all is not lost yet…it’s a long walk into the city centre though.
I had been emailed how to access the keys etc earlier in the day.It was all in German but I could pick out the main gist of the message so all was good.On getting there got the keys ok out of the key press and followed the instructions as best I could before ending up at the top of the block in front of an unmarked door…ah shit.My British reluctance to cause a scene meant I didn’t try the door of course and went back to the ground floor to see if I had missed something…
Luckily I bumped into a young woman who was leaving so I asked her if she could help( never be too macho to ask in these circumstances) and the unmarked door was correct all along…one more thing,and I’m not proud of this,the woman in question had clearly been in the wars and had a massive plaster/bandage affair on her ear and all the time she was talking my eyes drifted towards that area and she caught me a few times too.So not only did I hold up her day asking a lot of impertinent questions but I also drew attention to possibly one thing she was self conscious about…
Walked into town and found a place by the Hauptbahnhof for a few beers,Tried to suss out local bus routes to my area but there didn’t seem to be any,which is odd as it’s an area with lots of houses & small factories.There’s a possibility I was looking in the wrong area all together and there’s plenty around here…
Sitting outside the hbf having a beer my first impression was Koblenz is more relaxed than Wuppertal.The Wuppertal folk whilst nice enough did seem to be weighted down by the daily grind & drudgery of it all whereas Koblenz folk seem lighter on the feet…
Looking online I noticed a bar close to where I was staying(5 minutes walk) called the Germania Ecke and decided to take a taxi..a taxi to the pub? How decadent! And it’s cool and friendly and you can smoke there…the taxi driver and I had a good talk which wasn’t just “ been busy?” “ what time do you finish?” He told me the correct way to pronounce Germania with a hard “G” Anyway I have found my local with the resident scary ass German landlady.Trust me they’re a thing…
Anyway the sky is clear so it looks like shorts weather and as it’s not rained for a bit the Rhine might have calmed down a bit.It was very full yesterday and flooded in a few places upstream…
Time for a shower then exploring…
Laters alligators…
No comments:
Post a Comment